Retro Gamer 53 yomped on in a couple of weeks back, containing my six-page feature on Marble Madness (including an utterly gorgeous two-page spread showcasing the game’s six levels). Despite being a slight game (seasoned players can speed through the entire thing in about four minutes), it’s one of the prettiest arcade games ever released, and it no doubt influenced a slew of modern titles, such as the likes of Super Monkey Ball.

Designer Mark Cerny, who now largely works as a consultant in the industry, mostly on console titles, provided a great overview of how the game came to be. However, one of his insights that didn’t see print was the fact that Marble Madness, to his knowledge, has never before received the kind of feature found in this month’s Retro Gamer.

This got me thinking. Most other publications that dare to acknowledge retro gaming do so in a somewhat cursory manner, perhaps grudgingly giving over a couple of pages each month to a single classic title. And even when the results are worth reading (Edge’s coverage of retro titles has been of a typically high standard), you’re still only looking at 13 titles a year. With so many great games out there, created by people who, judging my those I’ve spoken to, are fast forgetting how the games ended up like they did, this just shows how important to gaming a title like Retro Gamer is.

For more on Retro Gamer, check out the brand-new Retro Gamer website. And for more on Marble Madness, check out Bernhard Kirsch’s excellent site.

I’m forever blowing (up) bubbles

I sometimes wonder whether the games industry has some kind of collective amnesia. That’s the only thing that explains how in an age where gamers feast heartily on fast-paced action-puzzlers (Zoo Keeper, Bejeweled, Meteos, the 54-billion Tetris variants), Magical Drop has been absent from consoles since 1999.

If you’re not familiar with the game, Magical Drop is a kind of reverse Columns crossed with a smattering of Bust-a-Move, tasking you with blowing up bubbles—lots of bubbles. They appear from the top of a well, menacingly jolting downwards periodically. The object of the game is to get your strange little clown to grab bubbles and stack lines of three or more like-coloured ones, whereupon they blow up. Like any action-puzzler worth its salt, cunning positioning of exploding bubbles leads to chains, which results in positively elephantine scores and your hapless opponent’s stack descending more rapidly.

Five titles have appeared in the series to date—three in the arcade (two on Neo Geo), and two home ports in 1999: Magical Drop F for PlayStation and the rather duff Magical Drop Pocket for Game Boy Color.

For me, the third game, the imaginatively titled Magical Drop III, remains the series high-point. The graphics are crystal clear, lacking the overdone effects of the later PlayStation game. And like Magical Drop F, it has a single-player story mode, with your little avatar faced with varied wells, offering new traps and features, such as blocks that only vanish when a certain number of chains have been formed.

This being a Japanese arcade title from the 1990s, some of the characters are a little dubiously designed (such as the various Anime-styled, scantily clad girls—although one at least plays atop a flying pig), but the concept and sheer fun of playing the game shines through any suspect presentation.

According to a swift bit of online research, G-mode currently holds the rights to the series, and has even helpfully added a large ‘contact’ button under the slightly ominous ‘Serious about licensing?’ bit on the relevant page of its website (so come on, publishers—what are you waiting for?). That said, this is alongside a chef-like cartoon character that’s either showing you how to press a button or emitting tiny red lasers from his forefinger. If the latter is the case and represents G-mode’s actual staff, I guess that explains why Magical Drop PSP and Magical Drop DS have yet to appear.

 

Taking a bow when your clothes are that flimsy = not a good plan.

Retro Gamer 52 plopped through the letterbox this weekend, and it’s something of a belter. Although there are a number of highlights, the eight-page making-of about the utterly lovely Star Wars arcade game (the vector one with the scratchy samples) is the standout for me.

Although I’m a tad jealous that Darran Jones grabbed that one for himself (well, there have to be some perks for being editor, right?), I also got to write about a classic arcade game: tile-based action-puzzler Klax. This game was devised by Mark Pierce, who now heads the excellently named Super Happy Fun Fun; Mark clearly still has boundless enthusiasm for arcade games, and was a pleasure to talk to.

His game is, in some ways, an oddity. Similarly abstract to Tetris, Klax spawned a slew of home conversions, which I had great fun working through. (Most bizarre: the top-down Game Boy version from 1990, which is actually less advanced than the impressive Atari 2600 effort.) For a while, I wondered why Klax has largely been forgotten, bar an appearance on Midway Arcade Treasures and as half of the dreadful Marble Madness/Klax GBA double-pack from 2005. The answer, I decided, is this: Klax is hair-pullingly, teeth-grindingly hard.

Tetris pretty much lulls you in and takes a while to go crazy, and even relative novices can go for a good while on Zoo Keeper before it overwhelms. Klax, on the other hand, requires ninja tile-juggling skills to progress any distance into the game. One only wonders what Mark Pierce and his partner in crime Dave Akers were like at the time the game was released—presumably, happily completing Defender blindfolded and one-handed.

That all said, the difficulty level didn’t stop me spending a few happy hours, erm, ‘researching’. Perhaps I need toughening up anyway, since one of the games I’m going to be writing about in the not-too-distant is one of the toughest arcade games of the lot.